Come See About Me (4 page)

“Maybe we
shouldn’t have waited,” Bastien kidded, wrapping his arms around me and
squeezing me to him. “Just look what happens when we try to exercise some
restraint.”

I smiled into
his chest. “So you think if we’d done it back when we were sixteen or something
we’d be
over
sex by now?”

“I think if we
did it when we were the sixteen the experience would’ve been over significantly
faster,” Bastien admitted. “It probably would’ve been over if I saw you naked
from across the room.”

“
Hah
.” I
eased myself away from him and propped my head up with my elbow so I could
stare into his twinkling brown eyes. “But I guess you’re right; staring at each
other from across the room would’ve been a lower impact activity.” I was pretty
sore right then but mostly I was just joking around.

Bastien’s face
softened and then turned playful. “Show me where it hurts and I’ll kiss it
better.”

I swear he loved
going down on me just as much as he loved sex itself. He told me once that he
thought he could live down between my legs if I let him. We practically did
live like that after we moved in together that May. In the back of my mind I
think I’d previously believed sex would prove overrated—not specifically with
Bastien but with anyone.

It was funny to
find out I was wrong about something I’d never consciously realized in the
first place. I suddenly understood how people could become so obsessed with
sex. If you were having a bad day it could be your pick-me-up, and on a good
day it was gravy. But more than that, sleeping with Bastien felt like speaking
a secret language with your favorite person. Once we were living together
hardly a day went by that we didn’t find time to be together.

But the best
thing about living with Bastien was plain and simple just
being
with
Bastien, whatever we were doing. He was the person I wanted to speak to most
every morning and every night, and even if I could, by some trick of the
universe, still speak with him for just half an hour each day, I know that
daily thirty minutes would be enough to make my entire life feel full. It
wouldn’t matter if there was no sex or that he was lousy at coping with the
minor amounts of relationship tension that surfaced between us from time to
time. None of that would matter at all.

It’s the essence
of Bastien that I miss, the guy who spent as much time in his head coming up
with comic book ideas to write and draw as he did with me, the guy who made me
coffee as he told me about his day and was just as eager to hear about mine,
the guy who always rooted for the underdog (except maybe in the case of Torah
Bright), and the guy who named our hamster Armstrong after both musical genius
Louis B and astronaut Neil, the first human to walk on the moon.

“This hamster,”
Bastien began jokingly as he held seven-week-old Armstrong in his hands after
we first got him home from the pet store, “should aspire to greatness.”

In my opinion,
we didn’t have to aspire to greatness. We were already there.

Maybe being that happy tempts
fate. We only lived together for eight months but that was long enough for me
to discover that most people aren’t anywhere near as happy with their husbands
or boyfriends as I was with Bastien. I began to notice that women constantly
told jokes featuring their significant others’ general cluelessness as the
punch line. I heard it in movies and television and from friends’ lips. Men
weren’t any more charitable. They often acted as if their wives or girlfriends
were nags or spoiled princesses.

Real examples of
partnership were difficult to find. The happiest couple I knew, aside from us,
was a man named Reid and his boyfriend Michael. In the summer between first and
second year of university I’d taken a job at the Royal Ontario Museum, in the
children’s gift shop up on the second floor. Reid worked for the museum as a
graphic designer and I’d run into him in the cafeteria or hallways from time to
time. By then I was becoming increasingly enthusiastic about my anthropology
courses, particularly archaeology, and had decided that I wanted a career with
the museum. There was so much to learn, not so much in my gift shop job
capacity but in the larger world of the museum, that I found myself making
conversation with other employees—everyone from the web designers to the
curators—at any opportunity.

Reid was a
chatty person. He’d talk to you about anything—recipes, right wing politics,
the interview he’d caught on Craig Ferguson the night before—so we got pretty
friendly at work. He and Michael had been together for seven years, but when I
ran into them on Bloor Street one day after class, the spark between them
gleamed as if they were still in the throes of first love. And the only
negative thing I ever heard Reid say about Michael was that he had smelly feet.
He didn’t even say
that
like he was complaining.

Love is real and
real love lasts. I used to feel sorry for people who didn’t believe in it—the
people who were lonely with someone else or lonely alone. For a while I was one
of the lucky ones.

That ended when
two police officers knocked at our door at ten after eight on January eleventh
of this year. I sensed something had happened to Bastien even before they
arrived. That sounds like a certainty people ascribe to events after the fact,
because they feel they should recognize such a momentous change without having
it pointed out to them. But in my case it was the truth.

I didn’t know
that morning, when I left for class and Bastien was still in the shower,
running late like he usually did, that he wouldn’t be coming back. I didn’t
know that afternoon when it was pelting hail as I sprinted for the subway, my
overstuffed knapsack making my shoulder ache. But forty minutes before the
heavy knock at the door, I went cold and dizzy, couldn’t stop shivering.

Our drafty
basement apartment was always chilly and I told myself I was being paranoid. I
went into the bedroom, dove under the duvet and forced myself to open my
anthropology textbook and read the assigned chapter on prehistoric social
organization. Gradually my fingers began to warm. I didn’t call anyone or make
any sudden movements that could turn my suspicions into the truth. But deep
down, I knew. Out there in the world something had gone wrong with Bastien.

I didn’t cry
when the police told me about the accident; I just froze deeper. The female
officer, who didn’t look much older than me, smelled like strong coffee. The
balding male cop went over the facts with an apologetic voice that was at odds
with his piercing stare. Then he leaned forward on the couch, one hand wound
around the back of his pale neck, and asked if I understood what they were
saying. The officer had a passing resemblance to my uncle Richard, and for an
instant I thought about how very far away the older people, my family and
Bastien’s, who would have a better idea how to handle this, were. But the next
second was worse—the next second was freefall—because I realized it didn’t
matter what would happen from that moment forward; no one could change the fact
that Bastien was gone.

An
eighty-four-year-old woman had run into Bastien when he was stepping into a
crosswalk on Bathurst Street near Finch Avenue. I found out later that she’d
dragged him thirty feet into the intersection, pinning his body underneath the
vehicle, but all the police said on the evening of January eleventh was that he
was “pronounced dead at the scene.” They asked if I wanted them to make any
calls for me and then proceeded to notify our parents and Yunhee, who caught a
cab over and was at my door within twenty minutes.

Yunhee welled up
at the sight of me, made more calls (the first one to Bastien’s friend Etienne,
whose house he’d left only minutes before he was hit) and slept on my couch
that first night. I alternated between crying jags and numb silence. Some
moments the loss didn’t feel real and in others it seemed as though the world
had collapsed and a hollow new one been hastily erected in its place. I didn’t
want to accept that new world; while Yunhee slept I sat on top of my bed
amongst Bastien’s things—the sweatpants he’d slept in last night, his Miles
David and John Coltrane CDs, his manga novels and collection of sketchpads—and
refused to close my eyes.

I couldn’t stop
poring over them, the things in our bathroom and closet too—old running shoes
that he’d held on to despite the hole in the bottom that made them unwearable
except on the driest of summer days, his denim shirt, two favorite pairs of
jeans (which I couldn’t tell apart), the single tie he owned (plain black), his
razor, shaving cream and toothbrush. The bristles on my toothbrush were always
much more worn down than his. One night the previous week he’d picked up my
toothbrush, waved it in the air and said, “What the hell do you do with this
thing, Leah? Looks like you’ve been chomping on it like it’s a stick of bubble
gum.”

I reached out
and picked up his toothbrush, the memory of him teasing me about mine
reverberating in my head. The bristles were dry—the last time he’d brushed his
teeth would’ve been early that morning. But if I hadn’t washed his dirty
breakfast dishes when I’d gotten home from class in the late afternoon they’d
still be sitting in the sink.

I should have
left them untouched.

But with so much
other evidence of Bastien’s existence around me, how could he be gone forever?
It should take more to be banished from this life than an eighty-four-year-old
woman’s creaky reflexes or attention issues.

I couldn’t
believe it. I couldn’t think or sleep or eat.

Time worked
differently once he was gone. Light and darkness were different. Sounds, smells,
colors. Other people were a pale imitation of who they’d been before Bastien
had died. That was how it seemed. It wasn’t their fault—it was just that none
of them were Bastien.

I couldn’t
imagine a future where day after day would contain no Bastien. I still can’t.
But the hours and days keep rolling on.

Bastien’s
parents and my mother flew out to Toronto the day after the accident. Mr. and
Mrs. Powell had his remains flown back to Burnaby, where the funeral was held.
At home in B.C., my mother fed me antidepressants “to help you through this.”
Our long-time family doctor prescribed them for me without even making me come
into his office for an appointment. I stayed with my parents for a week and my
mom pleaded with me to stay longer. But I felt further from Bastien in Burnaby
than I’d felt in our apartment.

I went back to
Toronto and shut down inside. In the beginning I showed up for classes but my
head wasn’t in it. At the museum I screwed up—cashing out with too much money,
or worse, too little. Boxes of stock went unpacked. Some days I slept late or
forgot to show entirely. Armstrong was the only thing I didn’t completely
neglect. I let Yunhee, Katie and Etienne’s calls go unanswered.

Yunhee showed up
in person, sometimes with Katie in tow. They’d drag me out to the movies or to
eat and try to draw me into conversation.

How are you
doing? Have you called Professor Feingold for an extension on your paper? Do
you need to go to the grocery store? It didn’t look like you had much in the
fridge. Have you spoken to your parents lately? How’s work? How’s Hammy?
(That’s
how Yunhee always referred to Armstrong.)
Is there anything we can do?

My professors
and TAs were sympathetic too, but couldn’t give me grades for work I wasn’t
doing. I was warned I could fail and didn’t care. Bastien’s parents generously
sent a couple of checks to help me cover the rent until I could find another
roommate or decide what I wanted to do. When Mrs. Powell phoned after the first
one, to make sure I’d received it, I thanked her but didn’t decide anything.

I couldn’t leave
our place but I couldn’t think. It was difficult enough just to get through the
day.

In mid-March my
boss, Pina, at the end of her rope after I’d missed two shifts without calling
in and shown up hours late for numerous others, took me aside. “Here’s what I
see,” she said in a gentle but definitive tone. “You say you’re sorry but then
nothing changes.” She tapped my wrist as though we were friends. “I don’t blame
you, Leah. I know it’s hard. So what I see is a girl who should go home and be
with her family. Grieve with the ones who love you and will take care of you.”

I shook my head:
no. Being at home wouldn’t help me. I needed to remain here, the place Bastien
and I had made a life together.

“You can come
back,” Pina continued. “Maybe in the fall to resume your studies. The city will
be here and we’ll be here. Your job will be here for you.” Her eyes bore into
mine and made me look away. “But you’re not able for it now. I can’t keep
scrambling around to find people to cover your shifts, and even when you’re
here…” She let her voice trail off. “I need someone I can depend on.”

“I know,” I said
loudly. “And I know I haven’t been dependable, but like you said, it’s been
very
hard
.” It wasn’t that I really cared about losing the museum at
that point; it was the money plain and simple. I wouldn’t be able to cover
expenses long on just my student loans. Bastien and I used to split the rent
and grocery bills and his parents wouldn’t send checks forever. “I promise
things will be different from now on. I need this job. I need to keep a routine
and be out doing normal things.”

Pina nodded, but
we’d had versions of this conversation before and they’d made no discernible
impact on me. The museum gift shop was easier to deal with than any of my
classes—no tests, presentations or assignment deadlines—but sometimes I
couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t ever forget that Bastien was gone, but I
couldn’t stand to have his absence thrown in my face by the outside world. Pina
was doing it even now. Everyone did it, even if they’d never known Bastien and
didn’t know me.